I Don't Think the Universe Broke Our Dishwasher
I Don't Think the Universe Broke Our Dishwasher
Five things broke in four weeks, and every one of them involved water.
The dishwasher started smelling strange and stopped getting anything clean. We called Vlad, our repair guy, and while he was working something happened to the sink, so after he left and I started doing dishes by hand there was water across the kitchen floor. We had company that weekend, so we took the boat out to ski, and the engine overheated at the dock because the impeller that pulls water in to cool it had given up. That night we got in the hot tub and the pump was overflowing and the heat had shut off. The next morning our guests mentioned, politely, that the bathtub in their room was not draining.
Water flow. Drainage. Overheating. Five for five.
Jana's position is that this is not a coincidence. She believes she has guides, that they come through people and circumstances and numbers, and that she was being told something. She said so on the recording and added that if it sounds woo-woo to anybody she does not care.
I am not going to argue with my wife on the internet, and I am also not going to pretend I think a dishwasher knows anything.
What I want to do instead is tell you what actually happened next, because it was useful, and the useful part works whether you believe any of it or not.
Your brain does this and it is not a gift
Human beings find patterns in noise. We are extremely good at it and we do it constantly, whether or not there is anything there. You see faces in tree bark. You notice your phone rings whenever you are in the shower. You go three for three on red lights and decide the day is against you.
That is not perception. That is a known bug in the hardware, and it usually works against you.
Five appliances in a Florida house built around a lake, during the wettest part of the year, all having water trouble in a month is not actually a wild statistical event. Pumps and impellers and drains are the things that break. They break around the same time because they were installed around the same time.
So no, I do not think anything was sending me a message through the plumbing.
And I used it anyway
I did not expect to be arguing this in public.
The pattern does not have to be real for the prompt to be worth taking.
Think about how rarely anybody stops and asks themselves what they are avoiding. Not in a vague way. Specifically. What have I been refusing to do, and what am I afraid of underneath that.
Nothing in ordinary life triggers that question. It is not on your calendar. Nobody schedules it. Your week is built to prevent it, because a full week means you never have to sit still long enough for it to surface. Most people go years without doing it once, and the ones who do it usually got forced into it by something awful.
Then your brain hands you a pattern and says this means something.
The meaning is almost certainly invented. The prompt is free. Take the prompt.
Living Lucky® Practice
Ten Quiet Minutes
Six questions. Write the first thing that comes, not the best thing.
You do not need a sign and you do not need to believe anything. You just need to sit still long enough to answer honestly.
01 What has been going wrong lately?
Anything. Things breaking, plans falling through, the same argument twice. No need to find a theme.
02 If somebody who knows you well had to guess what you have been avoiding, what would they say?
Not what you would say. What they would say. Picture them answering. You already know.
03 How long has it been?
Weeks, months, years. Write the number even if you have to guess. The number is the part that stings.
04 What would actually have to happen before you would do it?
If you can write a clear condition, you may have a real reason worth keeping. If the reason changes every time you look at it, that is usually fear wearing a reason.
05 What has waiting already cost?
Money, time, sleep, somebody who needed it and did not get it. Put a number on whatever part has a number.
06 The smallest piece, and who you are telling today.
Not the whole thing. The first twenty minutes of it. Then name one person you are going to tell, because a plan nobody knows about is still a secret.
The first answer is always wrong
Watch what we did with it, because the first move is the one everybody makes and it is useless.
Jana went looking for the emotional clog and did a serious amount of work on herself. Journaling, meditating, massage therapy to shift what she felt was stuck. She put in real effort.
And then she landed on this: maybe it's Jason.
She said that out loud on the podcast. I have done all the work I can possibly do, so I think we have found the problem and it is my husband.
That is the failure mode of reading signs, and it is worth naming because almost nobody avoids it. A sign that tells you somebody else is the obstacle has told you nothing. Same with a sign that confirms you are special, or chosen, or on the right path. Your brain did not find a message. It found a flattering arrangement of coincidences and handed it back to you.
Which is why the test matters more than the sign.
The test
Does it point at something specific and uncomfortable about you, or something general and flattering?
If the answer is specific and uncomfortable, you have found something regardless of where it came from.
If the answer is that the universe is telling you that you are on the verge of a breakthrough, you have found nothing. You have been talking to yourself in a nice voice.
So Jana said maybe it's Jason. And the honest answer, once I sat with it for a morning, is that she was right, just not for the reason either of us would have guessed.
What I had been doing for months
We have a course. It is called Create Your Luck. It is fully outlined, fully designed, and it has been tested with real people.
All that is left is for me to record the modules and hand them to our team to put live.
I have not recorded the modules.
Every time Jana said let's do the next one, I found a reason not to. I was not stuck on the content. I know the content better than anything else in my life. I was not short on time, which anybody who has heard me talk about my calendar will find hard to believe, but filling a calendar is also a way of being unavailable.
Three things, and I did not have words for any of them until that week.
I did not want the work that comes after. Not the making. The running. The support, the questions, the fixing, the parts that arrive once something is actually out in the world.
I did not want to be back in sales. I spent twenty years there. I left on purpose. Putting a course out means selling it, and some part of me has been treating that like a room I already walked out of.
And I am a cheapskate. That is the real one. We could hire people for the parts I do not want to do. We can afford to. But my hand closes when it comes out of my pocket, and so rather than spend the money I have been quietly refusing to ship the thing, which costs considerably more than hiring anybody would have.
And it has not been passive. I have been steering my coach away from it.
That is the part that embarrasses me. We have a standing call and her entire job is to find exactly this kind of thing. Every week I walk in with a stack of other priorities and lay them out on the table until there is no room left for the one question she would have asked.
The other priorities are real. That is what makes them such good cover.
It is a magic trick. Watch this hand. Do not look under that rug. I have been paying somebody to catch me and then working to make sure she didn't.
That is what was actually clogged. Not a drain.
Not every brake is fear
Without this next part, the whole thing turns into another lecture about getting out of your own way.
Sometimes the thing stopping you is not fear. Sometimes it is a value, and ignoring it would be the mistake.
Our podcast is in 147 countries and coming up on a million downloads, which for a show with no guests is a number I still do not entirely believe. Jana wants us on Netflix. She may be right.
I am not there yet, and it is not fear. I have not seen a contract or how the broadcasting rights are written. I do not need a platform to decide whether what we do is legitimate, and I am not handing this thing to a conglomerate that could wrap it in advertising I would not stand behind. If the terms were right I would say yes tomorrow, because the whole point is to reach the most people we can. But that is a condition, not a hesitation.
From the outside, my no about Netflix and my no about recording the course look identical. Both are me declining to move.
One is a boundary. One is a man protecting his wallet and calling it prudence.
No sign will tell you which is which. The pattern does not know. All the broken dishwasher did was buy me a morning of sitting still, and I had to do the sorting myself.
The part I cannot explain
Jana's side of this deserves better than a dismissal, and I do not have a tidy answer anyway.
Everything that has gone on our vision boards has come true. Not most of it. All of it, including things that seemed ridiculous when we pinned them up, like standing on a Mindvalley stage in Tallinn, or getting paid five figures for a forty-minute keynote.
I do not have a mechanism for that. I have guesses. Writing something down makes it statable, and a statable goal gets said out loud, and things you say out loud reach people who can help. That accounts for some of it and probably not all of it.
So I am not standing here telling anybody that none of this is real. I am telling you that you do not have to settle that question in order to get the benefit, and I would rather give you a tool that works either way than ask you to believe something first.
What happened after
I am recording the modules.
That is the actual outcome of a weekend of plumbing failures, and the causal chain is not what Jana thinks it is and not nothing either. Five things broke. We decided it meant something. Deciding it meant something got us talking. The talking got me to say three true sentences about myself that I had been avoiding since summer.
The dishwasher is fixed, by the way. Vlad came back.
Neither of those facts is related and I am glad about both.
Where this sits in the formula
What do I want to experience? Shipping the thing that is already finished and sitting on a hard drive.
How do I want to grow? Into somebody who can tell the difference between a boundary and a flinch.
How do I want to contribute? By getting out of the way of work that was built for other people and has been held hostage by my own wallet.
How lucky am I? That the worst thing that happened to me in four weeks was a stack of repair bills, and it still managed to be useful.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: Name the pattern you have been noticing lately. Then ask what it points at in you specifically, and throw the answer out if it is flattering or if it blames somebody else.
Reflection question: What is finished, or nearly finished, that I have not shipped?
Journal prompt: Where am I calling something a principle when it is actually a fear, and where am I calling something a fear when it is actually a principle?
Action: Take the one thing you have been refusing to do and name the cost of continuing to refuse it. In money, in time, or in people who do not get the thing.
Frequently asked questions
Do repeated breakdowns actually mean something?
Probably not in the way people hope. Appliances installed around the same time fail around the same time, and human brains are built to find patterns in noise. What a run of friction can do is give you a reason to stop and examine yourself, which almost nothing else in ordinary life does.
How do you tell a real insight from wishful thinking?
By what it points at. A reading that identifies something specific and uncomfortable about you is worth keeping. One that tells you you are special, or that somebody else is the obstacle, is your own voice flattering you.
Why is procrastination not a time problem?
Because the thing being avoided is usually a feeling, not a task. Fear of the workload that arrives after success, fear of selling, fear of spending. People with no time still ship things they are not afraid of.
What is reverse manifesting?
The idea that dwelling on worst-case scenarios produces them. Whether or not you accept the mechanism, the practical part holds: attention spent rehearsing failure is attention not spent building, and rehearsing a disaster often makes people act in ways that bring it closer.
How do I know if I should push through resistance or respect it?
Ask whether you can state the condition. A boundary comes with terms you could write down, like specific contract language you would need to see. A fear comes with a feeling and a vague reason that changes every time you examine it.
Does writing down goals actually work?
It makes them statable, which means other people hear them and some of those people can help. That accounts for a good deal of it. Anybody who tells you they have the full explanation is selling something.
Whatever you have been circling for the last few months, you already know what it is.
You did not need a sign. You needed ten quiet minutes, and the sign was just an excuse to take them.
We Create Our Luck®.
Hear the full conversation on the Living Lucky® Podcast with Jana and Jason Shelfer, Season 11, Episode 48: "What Signs Are You Ignoring?" Listen to the audio, watch the video broadcast, and tell us what pattern life has been showing you lately.
